September 14, 2004

And then he was back :p Basically, I haven’t been posting for the last few months because Blog was broken and I was too lazy to go back to an older version. Let me first see if this posts fine and then maybe think about writing a longer entry …

Hallelujah! It works!! At least, the posting via FTP does … but there are other behind the scenes issues which are going to make things a bit difficult for a while. Basically, I got all the work necessary for translating the existing data into the new database formats which support storing journal entries irregardless of where the entries are finally published to at least a couple of months ago. Unfortunately, just after I got all that work done and added the code in for publishing to remote blogging servers, I ran into several problems with the WYSIWYG HTML editing components. The usually reliable author of HTMLEdit would not respond to my bug reports and I was totally baffled by the problem since I didn’t have access to the source.

So, I decided to find a replacement component and looked at several. The authors of WPTools and TRichView were extremely kind in providing me with a free license to each of their components. However, I found that in each instance, I would have to do a lot of recoding and would lose a few existing features that I found extremely useful in Blog using HTMLEdit. So, I have been playing a waiting game, trying different components when I ran across them and then discarding them and at the same time, hoping that the HTMLEdit author would release a new version which fixed the problems that I had. Of course, nothing seemed to happen at all for a couple of months … or a bit more.

Then I was shaken out of my apathy by Nigel yesterday :p Nige has been a long-time Blog user. His site, The Red Ferret Journal, has around three years of archives totalling probably thousands of entries – all in Blog. Nige has been thinking of shifting to WordPress so that he can allow multiple users to post to his site but still be able to use the Blog interface by using the new functionalities that I was supposed to add with the next release of 8.0 :p So Nige has been waiting patiently for quite a while for me to get my posterior in gear and get Blog out but of course, it wasn’t happening. He finally decided to write to me and see if he could get me to expedite the process since he urgently needed to shift to WP and I finally decided to give the code another look and see if perhpas I could decouple the WYSIWYG component from everything else so that I could at least come up with a Blog version which did what Nige wanted for the short-term while I figured out the WYSIWYG problem. However, in trying to sort out the code, I actually figured out how to get things to work – or so I thought at that time :p

Of course, things haven’t turned out to be that easy. I did figure out the problems with the HTMLEdit componet but I discovered in the process of making this entry why I’d had problems in the first place. The original problem which started all this stagnation was related to the HTMLEdit component dropping images when an entry was saved. I realized today that only images but even formatting is dropped by the HTMLEdit component on first save. However, I realized that if I went to the HTML view and added some HTML tags and then switched back to the WYSIWYG view and saved the entry, it saves perfectly fine :p Ah well, the joys of coding …

In the meantime, I’ve also discovered that the code which seemed to work fine with WordPress a couple of months ago is now giving me trouble. But then again, I just came across an article online which suggests that this might actually be XMLRPC and PHP related problems than Blog related problems. So I’m going back to the code to see if there is a way in which I can fix all these things so that I can finally get that long-delayed version of Blog out :p

Tags: General
Posted by Fahim at 3:48 pm   Comments (0)

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